Women Artists - 19th Century

19th Century

• Marie-Denise Villers, Self-portrait, Young Woman Drawing 1801, Metropolitan Museum of Art

• Marie Ellenrieder, Self portrait as a painter, 1819

• Rosa Bonheur, The Horse Fair, 1853–1855, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

• Elizabeth Thompson, Remnants of an Army, 1879, Tate. She specialized in military scenes.

• Edmonia Lewis, The Death of Cleopatra detail, marble, 1876, Smithsonian American Art Museum

• Mary Cassatt, Tea, 1880, oil on canvas, 25½ × 36¼ in., Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

• Suzanne Valadon, Self-portrait, 1883

• Berthe Morisot, L'Enfant au Tablier Rouge, 1886, American Art Museum

Artists from this period include Lucy Bacon, Marie Bashkirtseff, Anna Boch, Rosa Bonheur, Marie Bracquemond, Mary Cassatt, Camille Claudel, Marie Ellenrieder, Kate Greenaway, Kitty Lange Kielland, Edmonia Lewis, Constance Mayer, Victorine Meurent, Berthe Morisot, Suzanne Valadon, and Enid Yandell among others.

Marie Ellenrieder and Marie-Denise Villers worked in the field of portraiture in the beginning of the century, and Rosa Bonheur in realist painting and sculpture.

Elizabeth Jane Gardner was an American academic painter who was the first American woman to exhibit at the Paris Salon. In 1872 she became the first woman to ever win a gold medal at the Salon.

Barbara Bodichon, Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale, Kate Bunce, Evelyn De Morgan, Emma Sandys, Elizabeth Siddal, Marie Spartali Stillman, and Maria Zambaco were women artists of the Pre-Raphaelite movement.

During the century, access to academies and formal art training expanded more for women in Europe and North America. The British Government School of Design, which later became the Royal College of Art, admitted women from its founding in 1837, but only into a "Female School" which was treated somewhat differently, with "life"- classes consisting for several years of drawing a man wearing a suit of armour. The Royal Academy Schools finally admitted women beginning in 1861, but students drew initially only draped models. However, other schools in London, including the Slade School of Art from the 1870s, were more liberal. By the end of the century women were able to study the naked, or very nearly naked, figure in many Western European and North American cities.

The Society of Female Artists (now called The Society of Women Artists) was established in 1855 in London and has staged annual exhibitions since 1857, when 358 works were shown by 149 women, some using a pseudonym.

Julia Margaret Cameron and Gertrude Kasebier became well known in the new medium of photography, where there were no traditional restrictions, and no established training, to hold them back.

Elizabeth Thompson (Lady Butler), perhaps inspired by her life-classes of armoured figures at the Government School, was one of the first women to become famous for large history paintings, specializing in scenes of military action, usually with many horses, most famously Scotland Forever!, showing a cavalry charge at Waterloo.

Berthe Morisot and the Americans, Mary Cassatt and Lucy Bacon, became involved in the French Impressionist movement of the 1860s and 1870s. American Impressionist Lilla Cabot Perry was influenced by her studies with Monet and by Japanese art in the late 19th century. Cecilia Beaux was an American portrait painter who also studied in France.

In the late 19th century, Edmonia Lewis, an African-Ojibwe-Haitian American artist from New York began her art studies at Oberlin College. Her sculpting career began in 1863. She established a studio in Rome, Italy and exhibited her marble sculptures through Europe and the United States.

In 1894, Suzanne Valadon was the first woman admitted to the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts in France. Laura Muntz Lyall, a post-impressionist painter, exhibited at the 1893 World Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Illinois, and then in 1894 as part of the Société des artistes français in Paris.